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SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION. |
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For
many of us science simply means studying physics and
chemistry in school and college and getting a
bachelor’s or master’s degree in science.
Without a degree man is supposed to be unwise in our set
up, leave alone being able to thinlk scientifically.
Unfortunately, it is far from the truth. Science is
derived from its Latin root meaning knowledge.
There are many ways of acquiring knowledge, and
scientific methods are one of the ways. However, the
scientific temperament is necessary for any wisdom to
dawn upon an individual. Unfortunately our educational
system does not encourage this quality in students, right
from the kindergarten stage. They are only asked to mug
up the text books and vomit the same in the examinations,
if possible, verbatim for better marks and ranks, to be
able to go up in the educational ladder. This has
created a new brand of pseudo-scientists that think that
science is experimentation, and anything beyond that is
superstition to be shunned. There are lot of myths in
society that need to be demolished for the good of the
common man, but that does not mean that anything that
does not come under our text book knowledge is all
superstition. Far from it! Science is better defined as organised
curiosity and research as logical skepticism. With
this background our next generation will bring forth
better data about this Universe. There is a rule
governing this Universe, called the Cosmic
Consciousness, in contradistinction to the individual
consciousness.It is not very easy to comprehend that,
but it is essential for all of us to try our best to
understand that concept.
We also give an impression to our students that science,
in its present form, is the greatest of all times, and
never let them know that the science that we know today
is only great compared to the mediaeval dark ages before
the 17th Century in Europe. There have been great
scientific thoughts in the past, both in our country, and
also in other parts like Egypt and China, when the West
was still writing nursery rhymes. To give only a few
examples, the value of zero (Shunya), the concept of the
wheel, pulley, mechanical tools of even the Indian epic
times of Mahabharatha and Ramayana, the Indian steel(
which even the British thought was far superior to
theirs, when they first made), the fine cloth that we
used to produce, the architecture of India of yore and
many others. The great achievements of today’s
science pale into insignificance if one cares to study
our ancient wisdom in this field. Even the ice packing,
which the West claims came from Sir Francis Bacon, the
father of modern science, was known to us Centuries
earlier. In fact Sir Francis was not a scientist at all
in the present sense of the word. He was a trained
Barrister, who accidentally taught the West the mantra of
experimentation. The western idea of Arabic numerals were
not accurate. They were called Hindsa in Arabia,
meaning originating in India, long before the West knew
about them.
The Bell’s theorem was successfully experimented by
Clauser, Freedman, and David Bohm in 1972, and later by
Alain Aspect in 1985. The world of modern science now
believes in the unifying theory of this Universe. The
discovery of the holistic background for modern science
has made scientists to accept the holistic view, and in
medicine this concept is going to make a world of
difference to patient care in the future. Even Einstein
did conceive of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT). Max Plank,
the father of Quantum Physics, wrote his book Where is
Science going? in 1933, and in the preface to the
book, Einstein wrote that Professor Plank was inspired by
the " hunger of the soul". The paper Observer
commented " Professor Plank is such a great
scientist that he can transcend the limits of his own
science, and inquire into the philosophical
implications" because Plank admitted in his book
that " we are always struggling from the relative to
the Absolute".
We have missed what Swami Vivekananda wrote years earlier
" Physics is bounded on both sides by meta-physics-
it starts with non-reason and ends with non-reason".
He went on " we only know a little of man, and so
very little of Nature, when we know more about man, we
will know more about the Universe." Stephen Hawkings
would want to have a God-less Universe, but he failed to
invent one, and admitted " a knowledge of the edge
of the Universe would give the complete theory, as
otherwise we can not solve all the equations. It is very
difficult to prove that there is no edge. One could
define God as the edge of the Universe, who was the agent
responsible for setting all these into motion."
" The ancient Indian astronomy believes in the
existence of two grihas Rahu and Ketu ( entities
apparently circling round the earth) which are not
material things like the planets of the modern parlance.
They are, in fact, imaginary geometrical points: the
points of intersection of the sun’s ecliptic and the
circle of the moon’s orbit. Even in modern days we
make use of imaginary points and lines ( north pole,
south pole, equator etc. on the earth’s surface) for
describing terrestrial geography. By invoking the Rahu
and the Ketu, the ancients were able to explain in a self
consistent way in those days astronomical parlance, and
then deduce the then astronomical data, including those
of the phenomenon of eclipses. The concept of Rahu and
Ketu in ancient days is thus obvious, despite the fact
that they are not detectable with a telescope and are,
therefore, ignored in modern astronomy." said a
thinking nuclear physicist, Dr.Ardendhu Shekar Ghosh, who
was with the BARC for a long time. He is a Ph.D. from
Sorbonne, and worked at the Madame Curie Institute in the
fifties, before joining the Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre.
Now we will look at the superstitions. Lot of loose talk
goes on in the so called scientific drawing room gossip
about superstitions. I have a feeling that we have not
given this a very serious thought, a scientific inquiry.
Let us, for the purpose of this paper, confine ourselves
to the common superstitions like the Rahu kala,
Amavaasya, Shankramana, Bharani, Krithikai only.
These are of no value today and have to be discarded and
not encouraged. I could not agree more! But before
we condemn them let us do a bit of research into their
origin, and judge them in that context. To do that one
must have a good and critical look at the world affairs,
and also the knowledge of men and matters obtaining in
the hoary past. I think for a novice in the field a good
comprehensive guide will be the wonderful book by the
great French historian, considered in France as the guru
of historians, Fernand Braudel, A history of
Civilizations, an English translation of which is
available from Penguin Classics ( Penguin Publications,
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England). Let us confine
ourselves only to certain areas.
Take the "great" works of art like The Taj
Mahal, The Pyramids, and the Great Wall of China. All
these were built with a passion, of may be one or two
powerful men, who were very rich those days and
consequently very powerful. It is power that rules the
world anyway! They employed millions of poor labourers
for these buildings, without any labour laws governing
their welfare. They were paid hardly anything and made to
work continuously for days on end. Many lives were
sacrificed in building these so called monuments. If our
younger generation was made to realise the human cost of
those they will not longer look at them with pleasure but
with great disdain for human ego and money power. The
other side of the coin of these monuments is very dark
indeed. Let us for a minute put ourselves in those
unfortunate labourer’s shoes and we will very soon
realise the gravity of the situation. Similar, though to
a lesser extent were the fate of millions of poor people
who built the monuments nearer home in South of India as
well.
I think( this is not Fernand Braudel’s thought) that
there were compassionate men even at that time who were,
possibly, also close to the seat of power. They must have
thought of this ingenious plan of inventing the
inauspicious timings and foreboding that make the
building of the monuments dangerous during those times,
thus giving the poor labourers some respite from their
gruelling task. If we observe these superstitions
carefully all of them are not in vogue in any given place
at a time. If Rahu kalam is prevalent in Tamil Nadu area,
the Bharani Krithikai are very common in our district.
This again is related to the local circumstances. To give
it an aura of importance the names like Rahu and Ketu
were borrowed. Dr. Gosh has already given us the reason
why the above concepts came into practice in the first
place. Today we have labour laws, plenty of holidays,
many of us do not work at all. We may have to invent
auspicious timings that bring good fortune if we work at
those timings and more people may be goaded to work at
least during those times. It is unscientific to condemn
any concept without going deep into its root. This kind
of science falls into what is called today in respectable
jargon as observational research or qualitative
research in contrast to the conventional
quantitative research.
Let us look at another common superstition in our
part of the country where certain segment of people do
what is called "Chitra- upaasana", where they
take small quantities of water thrice, before starting to
eat a meal. Looks ridiculous from our
"scientific" angle. But look at its beauty.
Oesophagus, the tube that carries food from the mouth to
the stomach is a potentially closed tube and the food has
to go through it by peristalsis. This is fecilitated by
small amount of water in the beginning, better than our
first swallowing solid morsel of food, the latter might
sometimes give an unpleasant sensation of obstruction in
the throat. This scientific fact must have been known to
our ancestors who devised this technic in the name of God
to give it better sanctity and made it a common practice
for the good of all concerned. See the scientific
background of a common superstition.
Now let us find out how scientific inquiry could be done
in this field. There is a nice and a mile stone study of
this published in the British Medical Journal recently,
entitled Friday, the Thirteenth. Friday is not an
auspicious day for Christians. If it falls on the
thirteenth of the month it is said to be very bad and a
lot of people observe this even today in the advanced
West. This study was computerised and well controlled. It
looked at all the Fridays falling on the 13th of a month
in the last five years for two incidents viz: deaths and
admission rates for emergencies in Northwestern region of
London hospitals and also the accidents and deaths on the
motor way M 25. There were a total of 20 Fridays in five
years falling on the 13th of a month. They were compared
with the same statistics on another day for 20 days in
those five years, properly matched for season of the year
etc. The results were very interesting. 50% of people on
those bad Fridays did not use the road, and stayed home.
Despite that death and accident rates went up four times
on those Fridays. The emergency admission rates had
doubled in the hospitals and also sudden deaths were
twice as many. The study concluded, applying the most
modern ststistical methods, that Friday the thirteenth
was definitely bad for at least fifty per cent of the
people in England. The other 50% of Britons still
believed in this superstition. Take it or leave it,
but they have given it a very scientific testing, all the
same. If we do this kind of inquiry and then condemn
anything, it becomes very scientific. Simply condemning
is very unscientific.
The present day science is at times dehumanising. Look at
what happened during the second World War. Three Jewish
physicists were driven out of Germany by Hitler’s
army, and they had no job but were staying together in
Birmingham in an out-house. They would never have come
together in Germany as they their own petty jealousies.
Now that they were together they were able to find out a
simpler solution to the problem of hydrogen bomb base of
U 235. While Einstein had written to President Roosevelt
that it would take 40 pounds of the raw material to make
a bomb, these three came up with a new equation where
only one pound of U 235 could make a very powerful bomb.
The result was the total destruction of humanity in
Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It may look very distant to many
of us, but they were human beings like us who died in
agony with all their worldly belongings. Those scientists
were Otto Frisch, Francis Simon and Rudolph Peierls.
Rudolph was very disturbed about the possibility, but
kept quiet as he was made the Professor of Theoretic
Physics in the Oxford University. It did not matter to
him if thousands died elsewhere! This kind of inhuman
science disturbs me very much. It was Martin Luther King
Jr., who said " Science without a touch of humanity
will sink man into the valley of moral nihilism; but, he
warned, absence of scientific bent of mind will sink man
into the valley of illogicalism". How true. We need
to have scientific temper, but that does not mean
condemning all that we do not know. Science is curiosity.
Let us develop an educational system which encourages our
future generation to be curious about the Universe.
In summary let me share with you my experience of sharing
my thoughts with a group of high school students
recently. I agreed to answer their questions. One girl
from the 6th standard asked the most interesting
question. " We take rest when we are tired, but the
heart which works continuously may also feel tired. When
does that take rest?" A million dollar question. The
following day I asked the same question to my
postgraduate students, only to find that they were
non-plussed by the question. They had never thought about
it at all. Where is the scope for thinking in this era of
learning byheart and vomiting the same in the
examinations? I hope we will be able to change that
scenario. " This Universe is wonderful wonder"
said Einstein. We only understand some aspect of the
working of this wonderful Universe. Let us be humble to
learn.[index]
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